About me

Software Engineer living in London. I think about software, retro tech, mindful social media, and languages. I'm a geek, a traveller, a learner. A turkish poetry enjoyer. I like to draw, I like to take photos.

When I'm not working on hard problems; I procrastinate by working on small web-apps. I founded lisan to help minority languages thrive.

Looking to hire me? Check out my cv.

Take a look at blogs I follow, or read some of my favourite posts below. Click here to see all my posts.

2025-01-09

Writing a Client-Side RSS Reader

A screenshot of the Simple RSS Reader app, showing a chronological list of posts pulled from several feeds

A few months ago, after getting frustrated with a few popular RSS readers online, I decided I could create my own RSS reader (as you do).

My main points of frustration were that; these tools were either completely paywalled, had free tiers that would beg you to get the premium at every chance, or were a pain to operate.

I wanted something that would just get the job done: show me posts from feeds I follow. Give me a clean UI to go through them, be completely free to run and use, and not have any unnecessary distractions.

A couple weeks later, someone asked if anyone knew of a good RSS reader in a whatsapp group I was part of. And I thought I could come up with something really quickly.

(Read more)
2024-10-16

Moonscript: could it kill Python?

Image depicting a snake in bits and pieces, early United States progaganda poster "Unite or die", highlighting disunity etween the colonies

Quick look at Lua

I'm going to start this post off by talking about Lua. I promise it will make sense. This post is made by and made for someone who enjoys using Python for their projects, and it employs a Python-based evaluation of the languages mentioned.

I started looking into Lua the programming language, because its name sounded cool. Lua means Moon in portuguese. In the official Lua website's own words Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description. These are certainly words. But what do they mean?

Lua is interpreted (too!)

(Read more)
2023-10-14

How to land a Software Engineering job in the UK

A view of central London from Primrose Hill in the summer

I have been working as a Software Engineer at Amazon Prime Video in London since May 2022. Job search in the UK as a Turkish citizen can be a quite difficult process, and not many people have visibility into how it works. This document aims to provide context and help to get you started from someone who has been through the process.

1. Glossary

  • Visa Sponsorship: Visa sponsorship is a process where a company in the UK, offers to support a foreign national in obtaining the necessary visa or work permit to legally work there. Visa sponsorship is crucial for individuals who are not citizens or permanent residents of the UK but wish to work there. The sponsoring company typically helps with the visa application, including providing documentation and support, to facilitate the legal employment of the foreign worker. They might also assign you an immigration assistant from an external company throughout the process.
  • Rolling Admission: Rolling admission or rolling application process, is a hiring strategy used by some companies. Companies continuously accept and review job applications throughout the year, as opposed to following a strict deadline for application submission. This means that job seekers can apply for positions at any time, and companies review and fill positions as qualified candidates are identified. It allows companies to have a more flexible hiring timeline, and candidates may have a better chance of being considered if they apply early in the process.

2. Finding a job opening

(Read more)
2020-12-04

Exploring Language study Optimization

Coursemaker is program to parse sentences in a corpus, and sort them in an order ideal for vocabulary study. See github repo for the complete source code.

The idea

number of known most used words versus their cumulative usage percentage in the whole corpus. credit: @thevenuehouse on reddit

Most used 100 words in a language make up approximately 50% of words in a corpus (This of course varies from language to language. E.g. it is lover in agglutinative languages). If you sort the most used words and start learning words from this list (frequency sorted list fsl) you can effectively increase your hit rate in the corpus.

I want to sort sentences in a similar manner. The first sentence of the proposed order shall ideally contain the first n words in the fsl. Any sentence can contain any number of words from previous sentences, and tries to incorporate any number of next m most used words.

(Read more)

→ All posts